Poets & Thinkers

Poets & Thinkers explores the humanistic future of business leadership through deep, unscripted conversations with visionary minds – from best-selling authors and inspiring artists to leading academic experts and seasoned executives. Hosted by tech executive, advisor, and Princeton entrepreneurship & design fellow Ben Lehnert, this podcast challenges conventional MBA wisdom, blending creative leadership, liberal arts, and innovation to reimagine what it means to lead in the AI era. If you believe leadership is both an art and a responsibility, this is your space to listen, reflect, and evolve.

Poets & Thinkers is a business podcast hosted by Benedikt Lehnert, with 24 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Benedikt Lehnert hosts Poets & Thinkers, a business show with 24 episodes published.

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  Episode #24

  The Future is Feminine: On who gets to imagine the future with Graça Fonseca

  Jun 3, 202652 minS2

  <p>What  if we gave ordinary citizens the power to decide how public money is spent? Graça Fonseca did just that. With her pioneering vision, she built the world’s first national participatory budget, helped transform a crisis-era Lisbon into Europe’s entrepreneurial city of the year, and served as Portugal’s Minister of Culture through COVID. Now she’s asking an even bigger question: who gets to imagine the future?</p><p>In this episode, Ben sits down with Graça Fonseca to trace a throughline from her years in Lisbon’s city government through her time in national offi...

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  Episode #23

  Human Conservationism: On improv, creative play and developing negative capability as leadership practices with Gabriella White

  May 20, 202643 minS2

  <p>What if the most important thing a leader can (re)learn now is to be silly and playful? In a world obsessed with optimization and yearning for certainty, Gabriella White makes the case for a radically different kind of readiness and skill building in the age of AI: one rooted in play, presence, and the courage to be ordinary.</p><p>Gabriella is a trained actor turned interdisciplinary creative leader who calls herself a “human conservationist”. A deliberately playful provocation that names something many of us are feeling. Drawing on the German word/concept of “Torschlusspanik”, that gate-closing panic of time...

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  Episode #22

  Hollow Echoes: Why AI art will never have a soul with Sean Wolcott

  Apr 22, 202641 minS2

  <p>What happens to art when the systems designed to replicate it at mass can’t actually feel anything? In this conversation, Ben sits down with designer-turned-composer Sean Wolcott who draws a sharp lines between technology, knowledge and lived human experience – and makes the case that no amount of computation can bridge the gap.</p><p>Sean has lived at the intersection of visual art, design, and music for over three decades. From early days making cassette tape artwork in high school to shaping Microsoft’s design language as a principal designer, he’s consistently followed his creative instincts wherever they led...

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  Episode #21

  Make Doing Good Look Good: On designing for belonging, moral ambition and the pitfalls of privilege with Harald Dunnink

  Mar 25, 202641 minS2

  <p>Can designing a movement get the smartest people to work on the biggest problems instead of disappearing into what one author calls “the Bermuda Triangle of talent”: consulting, tech, and banking?</p><p>In this episode, Ben sits down with Harald Dunnink, designer, serial co-founder, and advocate for moral ambition. Harald founded Momkai, a Dutch design agency “for people who give a damn,” co-founded De Correspondent (a member-funded journalism platform on a mission for “unbreaking news”), and most recently launched the School for Moral Ambition with bestselling author Rutger Bregman.</p><p>Harald’s design philosophy centers, as he describes, on...

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  Episode #20

  For The Culture: On beauty, AI slop, and what lasts when software companies die with Andy Allen

  Mar 11, 202656 minS2

  <p>What if the best business advice ever came from a five-year-old: “I think you should add some googly eyes and rainbow colors!”</p><p>In this episode, Ben sits down with Andy Allen, co-founder of Not Boring Software, 2 times Apple Design Award winner, and former co-founder of the groundbreaking startup FiftyThree – makers of the Paper app and Pencil stylus. </p><p>Andy challenges the dominant narrative of software design: While the industry has matured and systematized around efficiency and automation over the last 30+ years, he argues we've lost the cultural impact, the playfulness, the human expression that makes software worth m...

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